Spammed to distraction...

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My old email address was receiving about 20 or 30 spam messages
per day. I was unhappy. I was upset. I felt someone was taking
advantage of me. I decided to do something about it.

I organised Outlook and maintained a list of known spammers, and
tried all the tricks I could find. But still some spam got through.
The people behind it use different addresses every time, that's how
they keep deceiving the software.

So I decided it was time for more drastic action. Here are the
simple steps I followed:

I changed my email address. Your ISP account may allow you to
have several addresses, or if not they may allow you to change your
account. Ask them. I changed mine. When you are choosing the new
one bear in mind that dictionary searches are used by spammers to
try and guess real accounts. Now you can't change the part that
comes after the "@" so put thought into the first part. Perhaps
choose a compound word like "redpeter@". Or obfuscate the word with
numbers in place of letters, but remember that unlike passwords,
email addresses are not case-sensitive. If you do choose
obfuscation, remember that you might have to spell your new address
over the telephone so you shouldn't make it too obscure!

Then I sent my new email address to my regular correspondents,
and updated all the accounts I use online, including internet
banking for example. Yes it was painful, but I did it. For the
personal contacts I only had to send a couple of emails: each one
to myself with the list of addressees in the "bcc" field. This
maintains the privacy of your correspondents. I had send a couple
because I found there was a limit to the number of recipients an
email can have.

Ongoing I never give the primary email address to anyone who is
remotely suspect... never, never, never!

I never put my primary email address on any web-readable forum
including my own web pages, anyone else's web pages and newsgroup
postings. This is a well-known avoidance measure but there are
still plenty of people happily giving their addresses away for
free!

If you really want to be directly contactable from web pages or
newsgroup postings then disguise your email in the posting...
putting something like "REMOVETHIS" before and after the "@" sign,
but think carefully about it because spammers are smart and they
write clever scanning programs. Alternatively give your web mail
account (see next step) but I'd still recommend disguising it
though!

Many times internet users are asked to supply a valid email
address. For this I use one or two free web mail accounts
(hotmail/yahoo). These accounts have good spam catching algorithms
and I find getting spammed on these accounts doesn't hurt because
it's not really "me"! I check my web mail accounts only once every
few days, and find that perfectly adequate. The spam trap catches a
lot of stuff I have to say!

Just to repeat... I never, never, never reveal my primary email
address unless I am confident I can trust the recipient. In my
experience serious websites are trustworthy: the people who use
spam are the "bottom feeders"; you can tell that from the emails
they send!

One last thing in case you missed it... I never, never, never
give out my primary email account unless I trust the recipient!
Think of your primary email address as gold. It's worth gold to
spammers; sure not a lot of gold per address, but it all adds up.
They don't do it out of charity; they do it because they get paid.
And I am not giving them my gold, however small the amount!

And do you know what? It works. I have no spam on my primary
account. None. Nil. Not a sausage. Just emails from people I know
and trust. Mind you I haven't received any great offers to order
herbal impotence cures or sign up for organ enlargement either...
but heck, there's plenty of time for me to find out for
myself!